Harshal Desai
Every accruing act of gendered violence threatens to breach the faint line between reality, safety, familiarity and depredation for a certain gender. Every act of such misery, of brutality, of rape is also morally and emotionally burdensome on those that read of it and especially to women because it invites the empathy and moral imaginativeness to entertain the ‘what if’ of being on the other side of the newspaper.
It is impossible to start active attempts at the eradication of the disease - ‘rape’ unless we understand that - as long as it exists, rape exists a gendered weapon. For it is one. A weapon that has a distinct class as its wielder and the other its victim. Rape, by understanding, can only be committed by male against female. This has been so and until its eradication is ensured, shall be so. This obvious fact is particularly important to evaluate where our attention and effort at eradicating rape goes.
The obverse of this fact means, a certain gender perpetually runs the risk of being victims while the other (class) will never. Is this not true of rape? It is true, being born a man means that one is perpetually conferred the privilege of basic safety. Being born a man means that one will never even suffer, in possibility, the threat of certain crimes.
All this should make us understand this : Firstly, the disease of rape is not the result of an intrinsic deficiency in how the law functions or is supposed to function (and thus cannot be done away merely by making ornamental emendations to the legal structure); Secondly, if only a certain class (males) carry the capacity to commit a certain crime (rape), then the eradication of that crime must necessarily have to do something that fundamentally and drastically alters the constitution of that class (male behaviour, understanding of masculinity, patriarchy, traditional roles etc.); and Thirdly, whereby primarily no insistence and effort (by men themselves) is made to reevaluate what goes fundamentally into making ‘a man’, no discourses around ‘enhanced punishments’ etc. posed as probable solutions will ever be enough.
What the law seeks to do and (in its defence) can do (at best), is to criminalise ‘the form’ of the crime.
We as men have long overrun our due - to reevaluate ourselves, our behaviours, our understanding of what it means to be a human being, how we view and see other people, how we think of them, how we ought to think, how and the way we view certain things tied essentially to what we think it means to be ‘a man’ etc.
Tragedies that rankle the current times and have in the past, can never be undone. Nothing will come of nothing unless we as men re-evaluate and vow to drastically reform ourselves. We as men must understand that the onus of reformation and the responsibility to ensure that such things never repeat, lies on us. And only on us. There is no one else to point fingers at.